Bread Cast on the Waters

Post date: Jun 04, 2017 11:32:22 PM

At the annual meeting the Pacific Northwest region of the Haiku Society of America on 3 June 2017 in Seattle, Washington, I had the pleasure of meeting Gary Evans, a haiku poet from Stanwood, Washington. Among the many essays or handouts he had accumulated in his recent study of haiku, mostly printed from the Internet, one was “On Writing Haiku,” an old handout of mine from the 1993 Haiku North America conference in California. I had completely forgotten about it, and no longer had a copy on my computer (no doubt a victim of a hard drive crash I had around 1996 or so). Gary very kindly scanned the handout and emailed it to me. I’m now pleased to present “On Writing Haiku” on the Essays page, complete with a new postscript that expands on its fifty-four “comments, rules, and suggestions” for writing haiku in English. I’ve also linked to this content from the Not Previously Published page and from the Postscripts page. Nice to revisit this old collection of thoughts on haiku, which I think many readers will still find helpful.